CultureNOW - Court Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Court Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"Nishan Bichajian was hired by professors at MIT to photograph the streets of Boston in the 1950s as part of a study to learn how ordinary people navigate in cities. But he often went beyond his assignment to create memorable images, as in the older photo here, where the insouciant pattern of the ‘Hair Cut Shave’ sign seems to mock the pompous architecture of the building on the right.

In the old and the new photographs, we’re looking down Court Street from the corner of what today is City Hall Plaza. What’s common to both is the kettle that hangs out over the sidewalk. The kettle was created in 1873 as an icon announcing the offices of the Oriental Tea Co. On January 1, 1875, more than 12,000 people entered a contest to guess its capacity. A crowd gathered for the measurement and watched as eight boys and a full-grown man emerged from the kettle, inside which they had all been huddled. The capacity was then measured at 227 gallons, 2 quarts, 1 pint, and 3 gills. Those statistics are still emblazoned on the kettle's side.

The kettle was moved a couple of times over the years, arriving about 1960 where we see it in the new photo, on a building called the Sears Block. Today, the kettle heralds the presence of a Starbucks coffee shop. The Sears Block itself is a Boston landmark, dating from 1848 and constructed, like Quincy Market, in a surprisingly modern manner as a simple granite skeleton with glass infill.

And the pompous building on the right? Built in 1912 as the City Hall Annex, it now houses the Boston School Committee and other city agencies. Its four enormous Corinthian columns express a sense of the power and legitimacy of government that has vanished from today’s world. Originally, the annex was intended to extend all the way to School Street, replacing Boston's Old City Hall. It occupies a site where Boston's first jail stood in the 1600s. There, in 1699, the pirate Captain Kidd and some of his crew were imprisoned. So was the fictional Hester Prynne, in Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter.

In his book The City Observed: Boston, Donlyn Lyndon writes of the teakettle (or is it a coffeepot now?): ‘This fat and splendid object takes its place among the codfish in the State House, the unicorn on the Old State House down the street, the grasshopper atop Faneuil Hall, and the Citgo sign above Kenmore Square as loony Boston objects of affection.’"

- Robert Campbells and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Boston's landmark teakettle," Boston Globe, 2002

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Location

Court Street & City Hall Plaza
Boston, MA 02201
United States

Nearby Items

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Boston Green Fest		143 feet
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City Hall Plaza, Sears Crescent		401 feet
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